While China is knocking at the door of key trade agreement, will the US find its way in under Biden?
- Neither China nor the US are included in CPTPP, a high-standards pact that includes e-commerce, intellectual property, labour and environmental rules
- The Communist Party says China must speed up forming trade networks – with Asia-Pacific and Europe as priorities
Obama had taken no trade initiatives at the time, careful not to cause political division at home. But Lee successfully convinced him that the US needed to take new economic initiatives in Asia or “cede the region to China”, according to an account by C. Fred Bergsten, an American economist who served as assistant on international economic affairs to Henry Kissinger.
And long before his 2009 meeting with Obama, the Singaporean leader had noted China’s economic heft and speed in forming trade relationships as a way to “lock us [countries] in their [China’s] market”.
In a 2007 interview, Lee said: “I had told Charlene Barshefsky [former US president Bill Clinton’s trade rep] about 12 years ago. I said, ‘Better move before these chaps move, because look at their size!’”
The TPP, which started negotiations in 2005 as a pact between a small group of Pacific Rim countries, went on to become the centrepiece of Obama’s strategic Asia pivot and was set to become the world’s largest free-trade deal, covering 40 per cent of the global economy, until President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2017.
It remains unclear whether president-elect Joe Biden will return the US to the agreement, which has been rebranded as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or CPTPP.